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Wait wat?
"This meant that for every victory, you would earn about 30-40B."
The AT SKINs are worth that much? So CAS won 60 to 80 billion this past AT, in addition to the 15 PLEX for making into the best of 32?
I had no idea.

Placing 4th in your first AT two years ago is, in my opinion, really fucking amazing. Good job.

I've been selling my SKINs for about that much, yeah. I expect the new ones might be worth a bit more as they can be applied to all Amarr capitals as well as the Blood Raider ships.

Hey, figured I would add a few words onto Iddo’s excellent AAR rather than making my own. Iddo’s covered all of the matches in great detail, so I’m not going to rehash that. Instead, I would like to focus on the team as a whole, as it seems that quite a few people are interested in what makes a successful team.

Many people (including AT participants) say that you cannot win the AT (or even place highly) without having a huge team comprised of experienced tournament pilots, mountains of ISK and piles of AT ships. It's not true.

On experience, the team is 3 years old (AT XII was the first AT we competed in) and therefore has only competed in 3 ATs, placing 4th, “joint 3rd / 4th” and 1st chronologically. The most experienced person in our team in terms of tournament play was me. My main experience in the AT was helping Hydra practice for AT XI or AT X. My contribution to their team was assessed as the second lowest (out of circa 35 people). Apart from that, we have never had an AT winner (or runner-up) in our team, let alone contributing to decision making or theorycrafting.

On ISK, we started AT XII with a budget of 0 ISK and had to ask individual team members to donate ISK. After that, our tournament budget stood at approximately 80B, most of which was recouped and returned after the AT ended. Luckily, that was the year that CCP introduced SKIN prizes, with teams winning 10 SKINs per “series” they won (with a typical best of 1 match classified as a series). This meant that for every victory, you would earn about 30-40B. We ended up with about 70 skins and after giving some out to team members & contributors, we ended up with about 90B for our ATXIII tournament fund. By ATXIV, we managed to increase our fund to approximately 200B, of which we spend 180B buying ships, ammo & implants. This might sound like very quick progression, but the SKINS are so valuable that you really bolster your fund after a few victories, which most teams can pull off.

On AT ships, in AT XII we won 3 Chameleons & Whiptails, which we ended up selling. In ATXIII, we also won 5 Fiends & 5 Imps. The Fiends we won were the first really competitive AT ships we acquired. For ATXIV, we only used two AT ships in actual matches – an Fiend vs. Waffles in our opening match (where we won 100-19 on points) and a Etana vs. Afterlife (where we lost 20-100). Neither of those matches were decided by fielding those AT ships. I guess you could consider our flagship a sort of AT ship (With a value of ~45B), however it’s worth noting that it started off much cheaper – the 2nd Tobias web was sourced by killing Afterlife’s flagship, who acquired it from Exodus and the nos from Ronin.

In terms of what we did have that enabled us to win this year, in my mind it’s a few things, although it's worth noting that we're far from perfect.

1. Continuity – Every year, the leadership (and most of the members actually) of the team mostly stayed the same. There were always a few departures & new arrivals as is the norm, but this meant that we did not have to start from scratch every year – we could build upon the previous year.

2. Continuous improvement – Tied in with the above, every year the team improved significantly in gross terms. In AT XII, I reckon we deserved to place top 6 instead of 4th simply because I believe that Exodus was the stronger team and we were not good enough to challenge the top 3 teams in a BO3 (see matches vs. Nulli). In ATXIII, I felt that we deserved to place top 4 – still behind the top 2 teams but able to compete for 3rd. Alas, the brackets did not allow that and we had to fight Warlords twice in BO1s and they were clearly the better team on both occasions.

3. Humility – Every team has to be ambitious, but it’s important to be humble even in defeat. If you excuse away your losses by making excuses such as “we only lost because the other team was just lucky picking that comp which completely hard counters our comp”, “we “we only lost because they were lucky our X burnt out his modules!” then you will never try to fix those issues.

4. Grit – The AT is a gruelling schedule. You have to be ready for it, particularly towards the latter end of the tournament. The last day passed by in a blur for me – I honestly cannot remember exactly what happened between the 7 matches we had to play within those 4 hours. You have to be ready to bounce back and not just resign yourself to losing once you drop a match. We dropped our very first match on the last day and lost our flagship vs. our first match vs. PL and still ended up winning the entire tournament.

5. Finally and most importantly, hard work. You cannot underestimate the amount of effort that goes into the AT – we started practicing in May for the AT, stepped it up in June once the rules were announced. That was 3 practices a week vs. other really good teams (Vydra, Exodus and Volta). I estimate that we spent about 2500 man hours practicing, with another 4000 hours spent on logistics, theorycrafting etc. For a team of 16 guys, that's pretty intense.

To the other teams in the tournament, thanks for making this one of (if not the best) ATs. Special thanks to Exodus, Volta and Vydra for practicing with us for so long, we would not have won without those practices. I’m sorry that the bracket was unkind to some of you – you deserved to place higher. To PL, thanks for being such a great team and pushing us to our very limit and beyond. Honestly, I did not expect to win the AT and was expecting to place 2nd. It’s clear that you benefited from your ex-Warlords players. In the end, I think we were quite balanced against each other and that made for a great finals. I’m not happy about how Game 3 went down, so I look forward to a rematch next year, assuming I compete again.

To the skeptics that said we couldn’t hope to challenge PL, that it was stupid to deliberately not pick up all the ex-Warlords / Camels pilots, that we would be hopelessly out-metaed, and that we were not a top tier team, thank you for driving us to prove you wrong. We won and we did it our way, without being Warlords MK III.

Sulei

Nails it on the head.

I think points 2 and 5 are probably the most important ones in general.
3 is good to a certain degree, but is sort of tied into 2.
4 can be minimized with a good prep and some experience for previous tournaments.
1 helps ofc, but isnt a must have if you also fly together on TQ.

Thanks for that post!

Camel went through a lot of similar things when we won. But we had the TC backbone of Hydra and that makes a huge difference I can imagine.

Placing 4th in your first AT two years ago is, in my opinion, really fucking amazing. Good job.

Looking back at our run, this is probably the most improbable part of it all. I still don't really know how that happened. Probably having the opportunity to practice against Exodus from day 1 is responsible for most of it.

Also, even 3 years ago the level of competition outside of the very top 3-4 teams was significantly lower than it is now. Before AT12 there were 0 prizes outside of the top 2 finishers, so I presume that most people didn't even bother trying because of that. If anyone remembers, only 63 teams initially signed up for AT12 (so everyone got in for free), and now teams are bidding 200 PLEX just to get a spot. Spreading out the prize ships and adding the skins did a lot to motivate the player base.